Call it the Non-Starter Marriage, the union that dissolves in less than a year, sometimes before the thank-you notes can even be sent out. Mickey Rapkin investigates.

Steven*, a square-jawed Manhattan earner with an Ivy League pedigree, had the kind of picture-perfect wedding usually only seen in Katherine Heigl movies. The bride and groom, both in their late twenties, had dated for an appropriate, let's-not-rush-it three years. And the no-expense-spared reception was held at a glitzy uptown catering hall. Guests flew in from three continents, and everyone invited assumed this celebration was exactly what it appeared to be: the start of a very happily ever after for the newlyweds.

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"I cried when I proposed," Steven admits now, in a phone call surprising for its matter of factness—you know, considering that he left his wife only six months after the wedding, knocking over a domino that prompted her to empty out their joint checking account, hire a lawyer, and launch a war of words as bloody as anything on Game of Thrones.

We've all heard about the Starter Marriage: The marital training wheels that prime you for the real thing. But this is something singular. Call it the Non-Starter Marriage, the union that dissolves in less than a year, sometimes before the thank-you notes can even be sent out. It's the kind of bust-up we associate—almost anticipate—with celebrity unions. Katy Perry and Russell Brand: just over 365 days. Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries: 72 days. Drew Barrymore and Jeremy Thomas: 27 days. Britney Spears and her high school sweetheart: 55 hours. Even the seemingly down-to-earth Fred Armisen and Elisabeth Moss split in under a year (though legal red tape pushed the union slightly past the 12-month mark). And there's always that ticking clock in Hollywood: Who's next?

But what happens when civilians—regular folks who sit across from you in the office or at the Thanksgiving dinner table—get divorced before their first anniversary, and what makes them pull the plug so quickly? Had they been embarrassed to call the wedding off, and quickly the truth caught up to them, or was it something more complicated? What's really going through the minds of the already-divorcing newlywed?

It's not like Steven proposed on a drunken night in Vegas. Actually, his marriage didn't fit any of the standard iffy stereotypes (his fiancé wasn't pregnant, no one needed a green card, he wasn't questioning his sexuality). In fact, it seems he'd walked down the aisle with the best of intentions. When his girlfriend first started dropping not-so subtle hints about getting married, he'd reasoned, "We're at this age and we've been together for this long, marriage is what we should be doing." And yet, he says, breaking off the marriage after six months is the smartest thing he ever did.

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The take-away is counter-intuitive, and maybe even controversial. It certainly runs against the marriage-is-hard-work ethos preached by Dr. Phil-types. While most newlyweds believe it's their duty to keep at it—to go to therapy, to play the devoted spouse—Non-Starter survivors seem to agree: Getting out quickly and early is the right thing to do, and maybe even a sign of maturity (albeit a regrettably late-onset sign). At her wedding, Angela*, a Manhattan artist, remembers an old friend saying to her, "Why don't you take a walk around the block and think about why you're getting married." He could see what Angela wouldn't: She was about to marry a man she barely knew very soon after her own father died, and that probably wasn't the best idea. Angela broke off the marriage something like eight months later and while she was certainly reeling, she also considered herself a little bit lucky: There were no children involved and no real assets to divide. It was a clean-ish break. "Giving him back this huge diamond?" she says. "It didn't really mean anything to me."

Surprisingly—or then again maybe not—even therapists who are in the business of helping couples make it work and stay the course sometimes believe the make-it-snappy break-up is in fact, the most sensible solution. "If the couple hasn't given each other the opportunity to gain communication skills, potentially they're throwing in the towel too soon," explains Jocelyn Charnas, PhD, a therapist in private practice in New York who often counsels couples before the wedding. "But people get married for certain reasons and they want to move on with their life. I don't want to judge that either way."

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If there's a stigma to walking away too soon, perhaps that's as outdated a theory as Mad Men-era ideas on household chores and gender roles. A landmark 2002 study by the CDC found that three percent of marriages (more than 60,000 annually) end before the paper anniversary and one can only imagine that number's increased. How else to explain the mini-cottage industry that's sprung up to fit these needs? Take the website WeddingGiftRefund.com, which offers an insurance policy on wedding gifts: Pay an upfront fee, and if the couple splits before the year is out, you'll be reimbursed. (For the record, despite what Emily Post may say about splitting before the first anniversary, the divorcees interviewed here all agree: No one expects the gifts back.) The Non-Starter isn't strictly an American epidemic, either. A legislator from Mexico's Party of the Democratic Revolution, a Socialist party, recently introduced a bill to make quickie divorce easier, not to mention cheaper, by proposing a two-year marriage contract with the option to renew—or not, should the going get tough. (The bill came up against opposition from the religious right, and is under review.) Marriage-lite isn't a romantic idea, but no one can say it's not in touch with the times. In Connecticut, a couple divorcing has to wait an inconvenient 18 months before a split can be finalized. (Waiting periods vary by state; for example, in Ohio, the Carolinas, and West Virginia you have to be legally separated for a year before filing for divorce. In California, it's a comparatively breezy six months, though the unhappy couple undoubtedly doesn't see it that way.)

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As for the real million dollar question: Why would someone go from "I do" to "I despise you" at warp speed, the knee-jerk notion is that the bride got swept up in the Wedding Industrial Complex, and the hapless—or clueless, or cowardly—groom was simply powerless to stop it, reaching for the escape hatch too late. But that narrative is only part of the story. David Schnarch, PhD, co-director of the Marriage & Family Health Center, a counseling and healthcare facility in Evergreen, Colorado, puts a fine point on it: "The more the partners are not solid people in their own right, meaning the more dependent they are on getting validation, approval, and emotional soothing from each other, the more likely they are to break up in the first year. They have greater difficulty tolerating the inevitable struggles of 'Do I belong to you or myself?' and 'I want to be with you but don't tell me what to do!"" The Non-Starters seem to have a nasty habit of ignoring all-too-obvious warning signs, he says. But it's less a case of two people growing apart in record time—a common misconception—so much as two mismatched partners abandoning a house built on quicksand.

*Names have been changed.

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Nicole*, a Midwest professional, married—and very quickly left—a man she'd met in graduate school whose impressive credentials hid a dark, sometimes abusive side. It started with white lies. Books they'd bonded over on early dates? She later found out he'd never read them. He professed a love of traveling early on, too, only to deny ever having said it. "He was charming when he wanted to be," Nicole says, but he was also withholding, and Nicole was so distraught, she felt she was becoming unhinged. She'd strongly considered calling the wedding off—she'd even had an e-mail to friends and family ready to send—but whenever she'd threaten to walk, her fiancé would turn on the charm. "Believe me," she says, "if you're thinking about calling off your wedding, let me tell you no one cares about the plane tickets they bought or about losing the deposit on the flower arrangements. But I bought into the fantasy. I kept thinking, If I worked harder the fantasy would come back." Spoiler alert: It didn't, and when he choked her dog (true story) she understood this wasn't meant to be.

For Steven—the Manhattan bachelor who loved his fiancé but felt he "should" get married—the warning signs were even more evident; it was lit up like an airport runway. Red flag #1: His sister never got along with his intended. "She thought my fiancé was a princess," Steven says. "And that she wasn't smart enough for me. But not every woman has to be as tough as my sister." Still, the timidity his sister spotted hinted at a larger problem (Red flag #2). Steven recalls the time that he and his fiancé traveled to an out-of-town wedding, where the groom asked Steven to play tennis one morning as a way to blow off pre-marital steam. "It was a nice thing to ask," Steven says. "But my girlfriend had a problem with it. She's like, What am I going to do?" Steven was dumbstruck by her neediness. "I'm like, 'What do you mean? I'm not your fucking babysitter.'" His mistake, he says, was in brushing off this not-insignificant clash of expectations. "I ended up feeling more like her father than her husband," he says.

And yet, he's quick to add: "I loved my fiancé. On the night of the wedding, I wasn't having second thoughts." But soon after their honeymoon, he realized he'd had blinders on, and what had been satisfying enough love-making early on had become even less pulse-racing. (Red flag #3.) "I just felt like, 'Wow, six months in and I'm not into it?'" he says. "It's only going to get worse." Counseling lasted only three or four sessions. "I was already emotionally checked out," Steven says.

"If you talk to my ex-wife," he says, "she'll probably say I gave up on the marriage and I didn't really give it a fair shot." But Steven sees it differently: He says he cut his losses, and hers. "I didn't want to cheat on my wife. I knew she wanted to have a kid soon. I was like, 'You know what, I'm out'." She may have emptied their joint bank account, but Steven's come to see that lost cash was the price for his freedom—paid in full. Now, on dates, he tells women a simpler story, "I married a great girl who I fell out of love with after the wedding," and cuts them off at the pass. Pressed to elucidate what he learned from the experience, he says: "Sometimes I need a kick in the ass. I need to be pushed for certain things. But only get married when you're ready."

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To understand the Non-Starter—and who doesn't want to pry into the bedrooms of their friends, whether they admit it or not—it sometimes helps to look at the reasons why these couples got married in the first place. It's not their partners they misunderstood, sometimes it was themselves. If Steven felt pressure (societal or otherwise) to propose, Jack*, a Manhattan professional, was exactly the opposite. He was in his thirties when he did the down-on-one-knee thing with his live-in girlfriend, a prime candidate for life-long commitment. "On paper," Jack says, "she was perfect:" advanced degree, good family, killer at a cocktail party. Contrary to the pop-culture storylines beaten into us by reality shows like The Bachelorette or Bridezillas, his girlfriend wasn't pushing him to get married. "She wasn't like, 'Let's go look at rings,'" Jack says. "She wasn't that type." He was the one driving towards the alter—a desire fueled, he later realized, not so much by true love but by a misguided attempt to undo his past. "My parents got divorced when I was young," Jack explains. "And I was like, 'I'm not going to be like them.' I got caught up in the idea that I was going to have the perfect life."

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Five years removed from the marriage and Jack can now take full responsibility for what happened (and the hurt feelings his actions wrought; though he says friends and family were more supportive than he'd expected). He sees that he'd been the monogamous, boyfriend-type for most of his adult life and, to make a complicated situation slightly less complicated, he'd had some living to do before getting married. "I should have stepped up and said, 'I need to do my own thing for awhile.' It wasn't the right time for me." Instead, petty disagreements escalated into something both Jack and his new wife recognized as a failed union, and when an out-of-state job offer came, it seemed like a good time to call it quits. He hadn't given up on her, per se, but rather on the picture of the perfect life he'd imagined. The upside, he says, is that the Non-Starter marriage—no matter how brief—forced him to drill down on what he really wanted in life.

"I see lots of couples for premarital counseling, as well as those with serious problems in the first year," says Dr. Schnarch. "I help them use their difficulties to grow themselves up to more truly capable of loving someone else. Those who can't tolerate the death of feeling like soul-mates made for each other, or who don't handle conflict well, are more likely to split up."

If there's a happily-ever-after-after that unites these marriages, it seems to be an unerring belief that these things, as the saying goes, happen for a reason. And there appears to be something to learn even for those who have found themselves on the receiving end of rejection. Adam* was a 40-year-old professional living in New York when he fell hard and fast for a woman a decade younger. But a few weeks shy of their first anniversary, Adam's wife came home from the office, admitted she'd fallen in love with a co-worker, and she asked for a divorce.

Blindsided, Adam cursed a blue streak, sharing his cuckold's tale with anyone who would listen. "It was a Woody Allen moment," he says, finally able to laugh about it now. "I ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in 10 years, and I launched into the whole story. Every detail. There was something therapeutic about it." Adam had planned to celebrate the couple's one-year anniversary with dinner at One if By Land, Two if By Sea, a Manhattan restaurant known for its almost-cliché romanticism. When Adam called the restaurant to cancel that reservation, he says, "I even told that person the story."

Six years later, Adam still doesn't entirely understand his ex's actions—why she gave up so easily—but if there's a smoking gun, he can now see his fingerprints on it, too. When they were still dating, she'd abruptly broken up with him once, only to come back a month later. Adam had whitewashed over this hiccup rather than explore the root of it. "I think she probably had a lot of fears and reservations about marriage that she'd never talked about," Adam says. "And I probably had some expectations that I'd never expressed. When you don't talk about things, your spouse comes home and tells you she's in love with someone else."

Now re-married, Adam tells this story with a drooling baby nestled in his lap, relieved to have avoided spending years trying to make it work with someone who had reservations about him. Perhaps because of the carnage from his first marriage, he says, the second time around he didn't treat love like some storybook fantasy. "I've learned to communicate on a much deeper, more realistic level," he says. Looking back, he adds, "I said a lot of really horrible things to my first wife—so we'll never be friends again. But in a lot of ways, I will be forever grateful to her for having the courage to do what she did. Because there's not a doubt in my mind that we're both better off today."